Glad kids will no longer be waking up to bus exhaust fumes every morning.
I presume buses are exempt from smog checks? I've noticed that their exhaust fumes are disproportionately more obnoxious than that of smaller vehicles.
Another comment asks "I guess we hope these busses will last 35+ years?" so I guess the answer must be "yes" if 35+ year old buses were the norm
Vehicles over 10,000 lbs generally follow an entirely different set of rules, also sometimes qualify for different tax rules.
A smaller vehicle can only transport 4. A bus can transport 30+.
Say each car transports 2 people, it's 15 cars, where their combined emission is less than a single bus.
That doesn't matter for the 30+ people in the school bus inhaling the exhaust. I'm glad I'm no longer in that situation. In my subjective experience, it felt a lot worse than standing near 15 cars. That's what I meant by "disproportionately more obnoxious than that of smaller vehicles"
Genuinely curious if we’ll see any differences in student performance. From my recollection of riding the school bus, those fumes must’ve been knocking a few points off.
At my son's school the leaf blower guy consistently starts work right before student drop off time, ensuring a maximum number of kids (and parents) present to witness the fumes.
Prince Edward Island has been moving to electric school busses. They currently have almost 50 of them. https://www.princeedwardisland.ca/fr/information/education-e...
Really nice. Yes investments and money, capex and opex involved, but you know what? We need to get off the fossil fuel habit. The sooner the better.
From May. Press release: https://www.lausd.org/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&DomainID=...
That's great to see.
On a personal note, in the 90s, I used to judge the bus noise from a couple of streets away to know that I needed to bolt to the bus stop to catch my bus... Being electrical it will very silent :) Good luck!
Are they able to save on the fuel costs at this point too?
Half the cost per mile of combustion, roughly speaking. Higher upfront capex for lower opex over service life.
Also consider that the cost of diesel is likely to stay high into the future.
http://archive.today/ohDsz | https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-17/the-world...
Average electricity costs in the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim locality[1] have increased +46.6% since 2019 (+10% nominal CAGR?! wild) and is currently +65.7% above the national average.
Given this prevailing trend, I do wonder what percentage of projected lifecycle opex is attributable to fuel, and whether any savings will be realized in the end.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/regions/west/news-release/averageenergyp...
As someone who took the school bus as a kid? Who gives a shit. I think it's an improvement worth having.
Also: School buses generally run on CNG, not diesel. They usually have special filling stations for that. They can toss all of that (but then they have to make EV charging stations lol).
But yea, the stinky old detroit screaming jimmy diesels have been gone for decades now. They phased those out when I was a kid lol.
School buses generally run on CNG, not diesel
This made me curious, because its definitely not true where I live. I don't know about "gone for decades", but one decade ago LAUSD had one-third of their fleet running CNG[1]. Pretty interesting.
[1] https://www.socalgas.com/documents/innovation/natural-gas-ve...
And then of course the rest of the nation and world.
I suspect a lot of these can charge during off peak hours, most of which are later in the day.
The article you referenced is the average price consumers pay, much of cost is going to come from peak times.
Consider what "off peak hours" will even mean as California continues to push towards 100% ZEV adoption.
Today, we know how LADWP commercial time-of-use[1] is windowed while fossil fuels remain the dominant energy source, but I have yet to encounter an argument supporting a thesis that these windows will immutably hold (or shift favorably) in the near future, let alone throughout the expected lifecycle of these buses; mean reversion is far more likely, rendering an "off peak hours" operations efficiency strategy moot.
As a selling point to the public, the article claims the investment will:
> ...save the district $2 million on bus maintenance and fuel costs annually.
I'd be interested in sanity checking which sphincter and under what assumptions they pulled that number out of. The going concern in my mind is this +10% CAGR trend in the average cost of electricity for the locality as evident in BLS data previously cited. If that trend continues unchecked, electricity is projected to cost +33% more in 2026 relative to today when the fleet of buses reach full operational capability, and over 3x more by 2035 when the state is postured to be at 100% new ZEV sales.
To be sure, I'm not trying to assert that this isn't a net positive for the district...just level setting the narrative that a decision being sold to the public as an investment which yields net lifecycle savings is looking much more like an outright expense increase to be carried by taxpayers with notional 2nd-order effects conveniently dismissed.
[1] https://www.ladwp.com/ladwp/faces/ladwp/commercial/c-custome...
Cost increases in California are completely due to the cost of distribution going up. I believe (but haven't confirmed) that the cost of generation has gone down. It's complicated because of natgas cost fluctuations and various subsidies but it's indisputable that the increases are dominated by distribution cost, especially if you attribute the cost of wildfire direct and indirect costs to distribution, as you should.
The economics of distribution are weird. A lot of the infrastructure runs on 100-year old lines that are fully depreciated which have $0 capital costs until they don't. Costs are proportional to capacity rather than to usage. There are massive scale effects -- building a line that carries twice as much current is only slightly more expensive. But the big one is threshold effects. I have 100Amp service to my house. That service is over 60 years old and fully depreciated (aka basically free). OTOH, upgrading it to 200 or 400 amps will cost a lot of money. That same effect is rippling through the entire grid. I installed a 24Amp car charger instead of a 50Amp one to avoid upgrading my service.
And peak usage is always going to be during the day, even if California goes 100% EV and mostly charges at night. Peak air conditioning demand is going to be higher than peak EV charging demand.
Cheap overnight rates keep peak demands below capacity to avoid having to do expensive distribution upgrades. Even if it seems odd because the cheapest generation is during the day.
I know solar isn’t enough to power these significantly but these busses seem like the best place to try, in sunny SoCal.
A typical bus is apparently about 40 ft x 7.5 ft, giving a roof are of roughly 28 sq m.
Southern California gets roughly 5 kWh/sqm/day on average (though much less in the winter).
Electric school buses apparently have batteries of about 100-300 kWh, so a dollar panel on the roof could get a 5% charge on a good day.
That doesn't really make sense, when maintaining, cleaning, and setting up more efficient tracking solar on roofs (you need a huge parking lot for all those school buses afterall) or in solar farms would be easier, cheaper, and more efficient
Yes, could be in the parking lot. Part of the "solar" could be to put skylights in the roof of the bus and turn off the overhead lighting I often see.
Might be. Schools have a lot of roof space and busses are generally used only twice a day at low speeds with multiple-minute stops for a total of 60-90 minutes per interval.
A lot of sun in Los Angeles to charge between 8:30a-2pm and 4pm-sundown.
this used to be laughable to consider like 15 years ago, but there are guys on Endless-Sphere (ebike forum) that have solar on their bike that in some cases can generate enough power from the sun to keep the bike going. This would be a pretty simple calculation- I hope someone with more recent numbers could do it here
Put the solar panels on the school buildings, and the busses can plug in when they get there (and you get the benefit of reducing the school's electricity costs in general). They'd probably be able to charge enough in the sunny period of the day to do both the afternoon and next morning run.
What’s happening to the old buses? $2M in savings on $75M in caped isn’t that great, unless the old buses were due for a refresh soon anyway
We don’t know how many busses needed replacing anyway. And perhaps they’ll sell the gas busses with life still in them to other local districts to help offset costs.
Either way there are a ton of non-financial benefits here, this is great to see.
> And perhaps they’ll sell the gas busses with life still in them to other local districts to help offset costs.
Those districts are in the same atmosphere as the rest of us.
If it's bad to use them to burn diesel in LA, it's bad to use them to burn diesel anywhere.
LA has famously bad smog because of its geography. It sits in a bowl surrounded by mountains. California passed a lot of emissions restrictions because LA was becoming unlivable in the 1970s. (We all benefit from those, because carmakers sold the same cars elsewhere. The California Air Resources Board wields a lot of power in setting national policy.)
So while it would be best to stop burning fossil fuels entirely, we benefit if LA paves the way on electric buses. If they have to defer to cost by selling old stock to those who wouldn't be buying electric anyway, it's still a net win. And slightly better if the other pollution they still make doesn't produce the same concentration it does in Los Angeles.
> If they have to defer to cost by selling old stock to those who wouldn't be buying electric anyway, it's still a net win.
If the entire planet experiences catastrophe and there is a mass extinction and agricultural collapse, I feel like this is a distinction without a difference.
Then again, perhaps you are right, as it appears we are imminently headed toward this future even if every diesel engine on the planet stopped operating today.
That's not .. really.. true? A lot of people live in LA, local air pollution has a large affect there compared to a less-populated and less-already-polluted area. Especially considering those other school districts would be replacing diesel with diesel anyway.
It is generally good that carbon emission has jumped to the forefront of environmental decision-making. But it seems like a lot of people now only view these decisions within that context and have lost sight of all the other concerns when it comes to pollution.
Not every environmental policy is about stopping the planet from warming. Sometimes it is about stopping our kids from breathing exhaust and waters from getting filled with microplastic.
Buses (including gasoline ones) don’t last that long. Any fleet of buses is being continuously refreshed on a schedule.
From the article there's a 3 year lead time. So it's not like this is a sudden change of the fleet.
Tiny houses in the desert. Jk I dunno but presumably parts or the whole things will end up in Mexico.
After about 500k/million miles they end up in west Africa.
Are the busses there really retired US school busses?
Some are apparently. The extent of my knowledge is a documentary I watched.
There's a particular "Thomas Schoolbus" style that is instantly recognizable and I can confirm you find them in use as normal busses in many parts of the world.
Hopefully they'll use Lifepo4 instead of NMC for longer cycles and less environmental impact.
No idea why you're being downvoted, you're 100% correct.
I look forward to garbage trucks going electric... damned things are so noisy
Garbage truck sounds extremely challenging for today's EV tech.
Battery-electric garbage trucks are proving very successful to due to the short range, stop-start nature of the job.
They have been in service for a while here in the UK, and the operators are happy with their performance: https://chargedevs.com/newswire/dennis-eagles-new-electric-r...
Some of the smaller authorities are 100% switched to electric: https://news.cityoflondon.gov.uk/clean-air-city-corporation-...
Maybe for the time being at least a serial hybrid drivetrain could work - I'd rather a small engine running at constant revs keeping the battery (and maybe a capacitor bank for the acceleration) than the very noisy revving up and down every few metres.
Of course, with all that stopping there's potentially huge regenerative breaking potential so maybe it's not incredibly hard.
They already exist.
@dang HN title de-acronymizer strikes again
But who are they buying the buses from? Is it that large electric vehicle Chinese company?
The photo of some existing buses they have say Nuvve. It looks like an American company:
Even if the buses are assembled by an American company most of the parts (including the most expensive part - the battery) are very likely imported from China.
I guess we hope these busses will last 35+ years?
I mean what’s in em? Motors have very long service lives and can be replaced. So can batteries. Both can be recycled. The batteries may be way smaller/lighter by then too. The rest seems quite repairable as well.
Is it worth it compared to getting new ones in 10-15 years (based on sibling comment)? I don’t know.
But maybe electric fleet vehicles will change the calculus n when you refurbish them vs just replace them. Time will tell.
Regular school buses appear to be in service around ten to fifteen years.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-life-span-of-a-sch...
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-life-span-of-a-sch...
I suspect it varies wildly on region. Rust is the biggest enemy in places that get snow.
From that, I suspect seats get beat up.
Electric buses are nice to have, but they seem sort of performative. For the same cost we could simply increase the number of buses and eliminate people driving their children to school alone.
That seems like a false dilemma. Busses have a life cycle, so need replacement every so often already anyway. Over the life cycle electric busses shouldn't be more expensive than ICE ones (electric have higher capital cost at the moment but lower operating costs due to fuel).
So it's unlikely there's a valid case to be made that the cost of electric busses would be preventing expansion of public transport.
When I looked at buses, found that school districts and other operators can get vendor financing at very low rates. So usually they are financed. Which means the capital cost ends up being a flat monthly payment.
Which means operators only care about annual operating, insurance, maintenance, and finance costs. The total is important[1] not the relative amounts. If electric buses are cheaper on an annual basis and can handle the route, those guys will buy them. (Accountants are going to accountant)
[1] The opposite of people who buy personal cars who focus exclusively on capital + finance costs and ignore insurance, operating and maintenance costs.
How many more buses could you run for the same cost, and how much would they reduce car use? Hard to be convinced without seeing the math.
They'll probably save a lot in gas. Busses spend a lot of time idling diesel.